When Kim Stafford and his brother Bret were kids, they slept in adjoining beds. Just before they went to sleep, Bret would whisper, "Shall we make a bridge?"

Kim would walk his hands out toward Bret's bed and his big brother would crawl across, with Kim going on to Bret's bed. Then Bret would make a bridge for Kim to return the favor.

They would talk and laugh, and as they drifted off Bret would recite what Kim calls their blessing poem:Good night, God bless you, Have sweet dreams, See you tomorrow

Kim would repeat it back across the room, and they would fall asleep.

Decades later, Christmas Eve of 1987, presents are exchanged at the Stafford family gathering. Kim gives Bret a card: let's have lunch once a month next year. They meet in Aurora, midway between Bret's home in Salem and Kim's in Portland. The next lunch is in Donald, the next in Lake Oswego, their hometown. Bret tells his startled brother that he wants his ashes scattered on Mt. Adams.

A month later, in Salem, Bret pulls out a slip of paper from a Chinese fortune cookie. "Learn to cut your expectations in half." He says he's moving his family to British Columbia, 400 miles north of the border, and quotes a line from one of Kim's books: "Part of our love must be to teach each other how to live alone."

That's just a book, Kim says. It's not about you. You don't have to do this.

Kim and Bret are the sons of William Stafford, the poet. There's much more to say about William Stafford, but if you identify him as "the poet," everybody knows what you're talking about. He's the National Book Award winner, the state poet laureate, the pacifist, the teacher, the writer so beloved that there's a Friends of William Stafford society and an annual series of birthday celebrations that take place all over the world.

It's not always easy being his son.

Bret was the kind of kid who read "Les Misérables" at 13 and announced he didn't want any Christmas presents that year.

"He was so curious about international things," Kim says. "Our grandfather gave me a pair of pliers and Bret coins from Canada. He was really into the U.N. He was a big soul. Too big."

Bret comes back from British Columbia in 1988, troubled, and looks for a job in Oregon. He has interviews in Hood River and Redmond and mumbles through them. His brother-in-law drops him at his sister's house in Central Oregon. Her boyfriend Dan is home and they talk a little, Bret not saying much until Dan mentions he has a pistol. Dan goes to work and Bret searches the house until he finds the gun and uses it on himself.

Kim is sitting in a downtown coffee shop on a rainy autumn day. He's 63, ruddy and healthy, wide open to the world. On the table in front of him is a copy of his new book. A dozen others have come before it, collections of poems and essays, reflections on writing, a bravely honest biography of his father. This one is different. It's called "100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared."

The title comes from a book of the same name Bret ordered from the back of a comic book when he was 10. The most difficult trick was pulling a tablecloth away and leaving a wineglass standing. He tried it and the glass broke.

Kim tells his son Guthrie about the book and his Uncle Bret, and when Guthrie is 10 he pretends to do the trick. Kim says he could write a book about Bret and use that same title.

"I felt like I didn't have my older brother to guide me in this life. I don't have my father to guide me in this moment. I felt bereft. In a way it was the moment I grew up. So I guess that's a very fatherly thing to do, ultimately."

William Stafford, writes his son, is "the great poet, the man of words, whose many poems counsel connection, bravery and affection even in strange and difficult times ...." Stafford taught for decades at Lewis & Clark College, where his son teaches now, and used to advocate "talking recklessly," going to deep and uncomfortable places. He couldn't talk about Bret's death and would change the subject when it came up. He could write about it, though, and Kim took a line from his father's poem as the epigraph for his book:

"Why tell what hurts?"

After Bret's death Kim "would talk about him very early in a conversation with anyone I met," he writes. "I remember awkward dates, where my abrupt mention of my brother's suicide stopped the conversation cold. One poor woman wept. Our coffee grew cold, and the date was at an end. It was as if I could not proceed on any basis except full disclosure, as I saw it, feeling a clumsy loyalty to my brother's sorrow beyond care for the person across the table from me." When Kim tells his mother that he's writing a book about Bret, "she said a wonderful thing," Kim says, laughing. "I hope she'll forgive me for quoting her. She said, 'You know, Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but maybe the overexamined life is not worth living, either.' Isn't that a great line?

"I'll tell you one other thing she said, very sweet. She said, 'I'm glad Bill and I could give you a brother, at least for a while.' Isn't that nice? That really struck me to the core."

Kim asks his sisters for permission to write about their brother and the reaction is different.

"I hope it's OK to say this. They began weeping uncontrollably. They couldn't stop crying. I felt such compassion for them, such love for them, and at the same time confirmed in the importance of telling the story."

"When Bret was a student at Lake Oswego High School he convinced 300 students to plant a row of cherry trees along Country Club Road," Kim says. He's leaning forward, pride in his voice. "That's a big thing. He got them donated, he got the police to stop traffic, he got these kids to come out on a Saturday, and those trees bloom every year. They bloom every year."

A book is a wonderful thing, a lasting thing, but a tree is alive.

"My daughter," Kim says, "when we were driving past one year, said, 'Did the world thank Uncle Bret?' I don't think it did."